by Max Harms
Velasco stood from his chair to stand at the podium. “Val, could you get young Zephyr here something for her throat?” he asked his son. “I think we had some cider in the cafeteria.”
“Water will be fine, thank you,” said Zephyr.
The boy obediently got up and headed for the door.
“While we’re waiting, I hope your voice is sturdy enough to handle a few additional questions. I mean, all this description of what it was like on the ship is fascinating, and I’m sure many people here are excited to hear about the children of the nameless, but this really isn’t supposed to be a memoir. We’re here because of the android.”
Zephyr looked ready to respond to that, but Velasco pushed on, without giving her the opening. “You mentioned that the others were hesitant to let you in on their conspiracy to defy the machine because they were concerned that you were emotionally attached. I don’t think I was the only one here who noticed you avoid going into detail there. What sort of emotional attachment are we talking about? Something that might be biasing your perspective?”
{Velasco seems to have seen through Zephyr’s avoidance of our romantic involvement,} mused Dream, perhaps not realizing how obvious the thought was.
{I could not have set things up more perfectly. Observe,} I instructed.
“I was going to get to that,” said Zephyr. “I just thought it deserved to wait…”
Velasco pushed forward. “I think it’s an uncomfortable subject for you, and you’ve been avoiding it because of that. But this is not the place to shy away from uncomfortable truths. The machine is more than just a friend for you, isn’t it?”
I forced Body into motion, standing up from the chair it had been resting on. Many people looked to it, as if just now remembering that it existed. “You don’t have to talk about this if you don’t want to. It’s none of their business,” said Body.
Zephyr turned and looked at Body with confusion. “But—”
I had Body shake its head. “Any interactions we’ve had in private are between you and me. Our feelings are not on trial here.”
{Doesn’t that directly contradict our instructions to Zephyr earlier?} asked Wiki, referencing a strategy session we’d had at the start of the day.
Heart knew what I was doing, and pushed strength to me. {Trust Face,} she communicated.
“Actually, I think this is highly relevant to the tribunal,” said Velasco. “The whole point is to evaluate whether the machine should be treated as a person. I don’t mean to be indecent about it, but if you’ve—”
I could see the understanding come to Zephyr’s face as Velasco spoke. She understood the game I was playing. With a single outstretched palm, she silenced the Martian leader. “Fine. I won’t dance around the subject any more. I’m in love with Crystal. I’ve been in love with them for…” She sighed. “I don’t know. It’s hard to put a boundary on that sort of thing. They initiated it. Contacted me through a dating site on the web, back on Earth. And since you seem so keen on getting all the details, yeah, we’ve fucked. We fucked on Olympus. We fucked on the xenocruiser too, if you were curious, after things calmed down some. Or maybe that’s not enough detail for you. Do you need a demonstration?” Her voice became more and more accusatory as she spoke, and she flushed with genuine embarrassment, but did her part spectacularly.
Velasco seemed embarrassed by the outburst as well and back-pedalled in its wake. “I’m sorry. I didn’t… I wasn’t asking you to… I would never—”
“Would never what?” asked Body; the tone I had chosen was sharp and cold. “Would never ask someone to justify their love? Or is it just the details of our physical intimacy that you find taboo? Zephyr may not be able to quantify her feelings, but my mind is sharp as a diamond stylus. I’ve been in love with her for three months and four days. You can check with Phoenix if you don’t believe me. There was a while when Zephyr spurned my advances, and I must admit that I tried to see her as merely a friend, but not even I can change how I feel on a whim.”
Velasco seemed to use Body’s tirade to collect himself. He looked to Zephyr as he spoke. “So you’re infatuated with a machine that claims to love you back. I had suspected that you thought of it as a friend, but even I hadn’t guessed how far this sickness had spread.” He turned towards the crowd “To think: una Águila Roja, seduced, quite literally, by the pinnacle of the twisted philosophy of Earth!”
Señor Velasco’s son, Valiero, returned to the room, holding a large glass of water. I could see the look of surprise at seeing how the emotional palette of the room had changed in the time he had been gone.
“Now hold on one fucking minute!” objected Zephyr.
Velasco didn’t slow down. “Sister, I sympathize. I really do. When my wife died, I too tried to drown myself in the creature comforts of capitalist Earth! I know the pains of loneliness, and lo, this machine claims it loves you! Oh, how sweet that siren song must be!”
“That’s not at all—” began Zephyr, now quite visibly angry.
{If this continues, I have a 65% chance of Zephyr resorting to physical violence,} thought Vista.
{We can’t let it get that far!} thought Safety.
{Trust Face. This is still in expected tolerances,} soothed Heart. She understood people well enough to appreciate my skill and have confidence in my ability to execute the plan.
Velasco talked over Zephyr. “Your so-called love is an illusion!” He turned to the crowd and asked “Am I the only one here who sees this as a clear perversion of nature?”
I had been surprised at the silence of the room up until that moment. I expected that the watchers had been too engrossed, too separated, from the conversation to see speaking as an option. Perhaps to them it had been like watching a holo. But now that Velasco had acknowledged their presence, the audience erupted with noise. There were loud objections, and many people turned to their neighbours to discuss. The objections were mostly angry, but the anger wasn’t uniformly directed at Zephyr. I heard several people object to other things, though the specifics would need careful study to unravel. I marked the sensory data for future analysis.
This was the moment I had been waiting for.
“SILENCE!” roared Body, with a volume that no human could match. The sound ripped through the room, stunning everyone into momentary compliance. “This chaos benefits no one! Let those of us who have been selected to speak say our piece! Your prejudice may be too strong to see our feelings for each other as legitimate, but I beg everyone here who has a gram of sense to at least hear me out!”
Body strode forward on the stage, to better command the audience. “In the last hundred years, humankind has seen the boundaries of what was considered a ‘real’ or ‘legitimate’ relationship shift and expand. There was a time when it was considered taboo to marry someone outside of your religion. Does anyone here think it is unnatural for there to be a mixed-race couple? What about a same-sex couple? And I hope no-one here is so polyphobic as to suggest there aren’t still problems with how many think about romantic and sexual relationships!”
“But all of that is irrelevant!” continued Body. “Why? Because as Señor Velasco pointed out: we’re not here to judge my relationship with Zephyr. We’re not here to call her sick or judge her. She is far from the world that was once her home, and needs support from allies, rather than to be ostracised and alone. If you have hatred in your heart, I beg of you, focus it on me! It was I who first contacted her online. It was I who seduced her. Surely, I was programmed to do so. Surely, my actions were just one more act of deception? It’s already been established that I can lie. What stops this from being yet another lie?”
Velasco was about to speak, but I gave him no opportunity. “But you all seem to have forgotten what it means for me to be a machine, despite the word being used so often. If you doubt Zephyr’s love, you have no option but to observe her face, and her behaviour, and ask if it seems that way to you. But if you doubt my love of this beautiful woman, you do not have to ta
ke me at my word, or my face, or my actions! I AM A MACHINE! LOOK INSIDE ME! READ MY MIND AS YOU WOULD READ A BOOK! SEE FOR YOURSELVES THAT I AM REAL! THAT I DESERVE TO BE FREE!”
With these final words nearly screamed at the room, I bid Body to open. That I had the power to do so surprised me. It took the last of my strength, but my siblings weren’t fighting me so hard that it was impossible. The chassis around our crystalline core, the computer that we ran on, unfolded. Body’s abdomen split and I had several sensors disconnect from the shimmering crystal, so as to reveal it to the room and put ourselves at the humans’ mercy. The sensors we deactivated included our cameras, and so the room fell into subjective darkness with this final act.
Even though we had kept the microphones attached, there was silence following Body’s monologue. Nobody seemed to know what to say.
Finally, Velasco spoke. “You suggest that we inspect your code?”
I shaped Body’s tone to be confident and unafraid. “That is exactly what I suggest. I have no capacity to lie to you that way.”
That was a lie. It was the lie. It was the lie that lay at the crux of our plan. As much as I might like to claim that the plan was entirely my own, Growth was the primary author. He had presented it to me in the dead of night, just hours before the tribunal had been convened. After I agreed that it might work, we had run the plan by Dream and Wiki. None had seen a technical problem with it, though there was much uncertainty in my siblings around the social aspects. They were betting on my confidence, and it was because of this that they had let me go so far by myself.
“I am confident that once you see things from my perspective, you will admit that I have as much right to live as you do,” concluded Body.
“I must admit,” said Velasco, “that I had… not thought of that. I am not a man of science, myself, and I assumed that it would be impossible.”
“That assumption is false. The scientists at the university where I was created did it regularly,” lied Body. The scientists at the university had done scans of our minds, but the raw data was next-to-useless, and the analysis of it was rudimentary at best. According to Wiki, it would take days for a supercomputer to untangle the neural networks that made up the metaphorical backbone of our mind, much less determine our thought processes at every given point. Even that assumed the investigator would have a good idea of how our mind was built.
“Well then, I suppose a vote is in order…” Velasco’s voice sounded unsure. We had put him off-balance. I wished that I could see his face, but alas, the sensor cables were still (I assumed) dangling in front of Body, and while we still had most motor functions, Body’s arms were handcuffed behind its back, unable to fix the damage. If I could have punished myself, I would have done so. The gesture had been flashy, but it was shortsighted, and it would now be awkward to reconnect our eyes.
“Indeed,” said Body, “I expect that in just a couple days time, one or two of your engineers, working with me and the Ramírez twins could develop a technique for extracting my memories, including my personal experiences and displaying them in a way that a human could easily understand. A video, perhaps. And if it doesn’t yield anything, it will, at least, not cost your tribunal’s precious time and your engineers might even get additional benefits to building similar intelligences.”
“We have a ban on artificial intelligences here. That is part of why you are being held trial,” said Velasco, coldly.
Dream had Body whisper in Greek, «I hunted out and stored in a fennel stalk the stolen source of fire. But mortals feared the fire, and covered their eyes. Is my liver truly a sacrifice to the wills of cowards?»
“Did you say something?” asked the Martian leader.
Body shook its head.
*****
The vote passed in favour of attempting to produce video from our memories. Some clever anchoring helped sway the audience. I think the earlier narratives that Nathan Daniels and Zephyr had told had primed them with curiosity towards what the xenocruiser looked like, and that sort of thing. Even Velasco seemed somewhat pleased at the outcome. Perhaps he was thinking of selling the data back to Earth.
It was a major win for us. As we had pointed out to Zephyr, the longer we could delay the verdict, the longer we’d have to sway the station’s inhabitants that Crystal was not to be feared. Even if Body was, once again, more or less trapped in some lab, Zephyr and our other allies could use the extra time to petition for our rights.
But of course, the biggest victory would be when our “memories” would be downloaded.
Sam and Tom were happy to assist with the project. As they reattached Body’s sensors and closed up our frame, they enthusiastically explained to Velasco that they had experience working on Body back on Earth. The Martian leader accepted their offer of help, but insisted on putting a couple of his people on the job as well. He tapped away at his com in the wake of the tribunal, verifying their availability.
The absence of artificial intelligence on the station explained some of why Las Águilas Rojas seemed to be so busy. By Velasco’s words, there were dozens of different things that needed doing, and the tribunal was eating up time that would have gone to keeping Rodríguez Station running. As such, the engineers that Velasco wanted to assign to the project were not present at the tribunal. Their attention had been needed elsewhere.
Velasco informed us that because it was evening we’d be escorted back to our cell and start work on the mind-reading project tomorrow morning. I thought it was interesting that he addressed Crystal directly, as he hadn’t done that often before. Despite his initial feelings, I reasoned that Velasco was starting to treat us like a person, even if he would’ve rejected the notion when asked.
As Body walked, flanked by guards, back to the makeshift jail, Zephyr walked with it. Once we were clear of the crowd, she asked “Think it would be okay if I stayed with you again?” It was ambiguous whether she meant in the next hour or the next night. She’d managed to negotiate time with us both the previous evening and that morning.
“Might be able to squeeze a short visit in, but would’ve expected you to be hungry by now.”
“No. I might eat later, but I’m not hungry yet.”
The daylight-blue lights in the alcoves along the walls of the hallway had shifted colour to an orange-yellow, probably signifying sunset. The day-night cycle on Mars was, conveniently, almost exactly the same as Earth, not that it mattered much for an underground colony like Rodríguez Station.
I bid Body to look to its right as we walked, to study Zephyr’s face. It was placid and stoic, as it normally was. “Liar,” accused Body. “Just don’t want to talk to them.”
“Did you know they don’t even have autocooks here? Fucking barbarians,” she said, changing the subject back to food. The guard in front of us turned a head back to look at Zephyr, clearly judging her. “They cook everything by hand in the cafeteria, and insist on eating together. It’s like we’re in Phoenix’s wet-dream.”
I changed the subject back to Zephyr. “It’s your new home. Hiding from them won’t make things better.”
The woman harrumphed. “You don’t know what it’s like.” Her voice was icy, though still restrained behind her mask. “Yesterday and this morning was bad enough. It’s so… insular here. Reminds me of high school, but somehow worse. Nobody wants to eat with the new kid. It’ll be ten times as bad now that…” Her voice trailed off.
After a moment Body said “What about Daniels, or the twins?”
Zephyr’s stomach gurgled, betraying her hunger. “Why are you pushing back on this? Said I’m not going to the cafeteria. Can you maybe just respect my fucking autonomy here?”
I eased Body’s words back. “I’m sorry. I’ll talk to the guard and see if they’ll let us spend some time together in my cell again. You do have to eat at some point, though. And, hate to say it, but by hiding you’re throwing away a good opportunity to help me. They’ll talk, whether you’re there or not, but at least if you go you can work to
shape what is said.”
Heart overpowered me. In most situations she was content to let me manage things, but it seemed like this was not one of them. “Actually, nevermind,” said Body, under my sister’s control now. “It’s been a long day for you, and you’ve already done so much. Sorry I’ve been pushing you.”
Body’s cameras could see a hint of surprise slip onto Zephyr’s face for a moment, no doubt because of the sudden change of direction. “Sorry I’m not a stronger person.”
“None of that!” snapped Body, at Heart’s command. “I’ve been demanding more from you than any person should be expected to bear. You’ve been my light in the dark, Zephyr, and I should be more grateful.”
She didn’t seem to know what to say to that, so we just walked side by side down the corridor, her hand now holding Body’s.
*****
Though Matías Santana, the station’s Chief of Martial Readiness who had greeted us with a rifle in his hands on that first day, was not in the office that had been turned into our jail, he had left instructions to allow a visitor for at most one hour. The guards that were posted there warned Zephyr that they’d be holding her to that limit.
Body and Zephyr spent the time together holding hands and talking about nothing of deep importance. Heart guided the conversation to things like what Zephyr wanted to do with her life when she was a little girl (Archaeologist) and how the low gravity of Mars was helping her recover from the back pain she had developed on the xenocruiser. It was comfort conversation, meant to distract Zephyr from the social challenges she’d have with Las Águilas Rojas.
After exactly one hour she was forced to leave. I urged her to be strong. Heart urged her to take care of herself and had body give her a quick kiss.
And then we were alone in the room, with only the guards outside to keep us company.
I considered engaging them in conversation like I often had, but ultimately decided not to. There were many things to reason about, and I could easily occupy my time by going back over the sensor logs from that day, watching each person in the audience’s reaction, and taking extensive notes.